Okay, it's that time of the year...

[Eireann]

Share your ghost stories! I expect LOTS of them.

[Kit-Ginevra]

OK then..Amongst the customers at a pub which I used to go to was a strange phantom-like being.Cheerful enough,he'd saunter in about 9.30 and have a couple of drinks.Didn't say much,just floated above the bar stools for a while.One night,he was rather late and didn't show up for nearly three quarters of an hour after he was supposed to have.When he went to get his usual,the barman had to refuse him service.The reason he gave...




We aren't allowed to serve spirits after 10pm


Is that what you're looking for

[Eireann]

Nope, try again.

[Amusement Gal]

Well, I have a spiritual attachment, does that count? I get to hear their lovely voices (sarcasm) 24/7 in my head, and no amount of prayer will help. Why? They're apparently Christian and not afraid of prayer, and just like to cause trouble to other spirits, for whom they like to translate for as well. I haven't had any of them throw stuff around, but several of the attached spirit's cronies (just as mischievous) pretty much blew out my main light, causing me to sleep in the dark for a good couple of nights before I could afford a lightbulb.

[Sheldonrs]

I saw Ghost at the movies when it came out. I cried when Swayze died.

Does that count? :-)

[Eireann]

Most of you aren't even trying. Hop to it! I'm talking actual experiences with the supernatural. Or family legends. That creepy house that you find in every neighborhood. Stories you've heard.

[Pixilated]

Hmmm ... real ghost stories ... well the only thing that comes to mind right ATM is me being awakened in the wee hours by a tapping on the window. Just a tree branch, I thought.

Then I remembered: there were no trees just outside this window ... and I was on the third floor so it wasn't a passerby either ...

Never did figure out whether I'd actually heard something or whether it was one of those half-awake half-asleep-and-dreaming situations. All I remember is lying WIDE awake with the covers pulled up to my nose for a couple of hours afterwards.

[KellyHabersham]

Not sure if this is really a "ghost" story, but something a bit creepy which happened a few years back.....

At the time, I was still living in an apartment, and it was on the second floor. I'd heard what sounded like my daughter calling my name, it was far away, and so I thought maybe they'd come over and she was standing on the ground outside my balcony. I went and looked, and didn't see anyone, but kept hearing "Mom......it really sounded like my daughter, but sort of like she was at the bottom of a well.

Anyhow, I turned around, and realized that this was coming out of my then-eldest cat's mouth.

[DeltaSierra]

Hubby and I were just discussing this very subject the other night. We both have experiences.

My one and only was waking up in the middle of the night when I was 6 years old to find my favorite Aunt sitting at the end of my bed. We talked a bit, she told me to "be a good girl", gave me a hug, and I fell back asleep. My parents got a call in the morning that she'd passed away that night.

Hubby's - he was working as a police officer on Long Island, and one of his duties required him to check out an old abandoned hospital. He'd been warned by his supervisor that occasionally "weird things happen there". Once, when he was with his supervisor and they were standing at one end of a LONG hallway, they noticed two swinging doors at the end of the hallway moving back and forth - when they got to the end, the doors were chained and padlocked shut - no way they could have been swinging.

Another time, hubby was checking out the old operating rooms and he started to hear a sound like a child running a stick along a fence (there were lockers lining the halls outside the operating rooms) and then heard a child's voice saying "Mommy, I'm sorry!" and that voice repeated several times. He came out of one of the operating rooms and thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye go into the hallway, so he followed, and he says he saw, clear as day, a ball roll across the hall from one room to the next, and a little blonde-haired girl chased it. When he followed into the room, it was empty.

[MoonCat]

Erm. Well, my family's got some but they're mostly not the kind involving spirits you can see.

Before my mom got married, her brother & his wife had a little girl who got very sick as an infant. Shortly before the baby passed away, my mother said she came to her in a dream, talking away in baby talk. Note, this little girl was too young yet to talk when she died.

My sister had a dream about our great-grandmother, and she says when she woke up, sometime in the middle of the night, she was afraid to open her eyes because she could feel the lady standing there beside her.

We mostly have visitations in dreams. I'm content to keep it that way.

[ReverendBSB]

Not really a ghost story but..

One day in high school I was driving a few friends home and after leaving the comic book store we ended up driving down a major highway too far and decided to take an unfamiliar road thinking it would take us the right way. We drive down it until it became completely country with no houses, cars or anything. It felt like we were driving for hours when looking at a map later it should have been no more than 30 minutes. Halfway through we passed an old ramshackle church with a parking lot full of old cars, and I mean old in the classic sense, not poor old. The few people we saw outside all were dressed in suits, hats, and dresses in the late afternoon Louisiana heat.

We were so glad when we finally hit a recognizable road.

[Pixilated]

Oh, that reminds me of a locale from my distant past ... when I was first starting out as a journalist, I spent the summer working on a small weekly waaaaaaay up in a small town (population 1,000) in northern Ontario (on the Ontario-Manitoba border, actually). It was the type of town you could easily walk through in one day. As I didn't have a car I did a lot of walking, and one day walked past a church on a road with not much else on it. The church wasn't particularly derelict, but it had no sign out front identifying it, no nameplate on the building, nothing ... just the most ginormous cross I have EVER seen on the front lawn. I felt like I'd just walked into a Stephen King novel (most likely Salem's Lot ...)

[Eireann]

Now we're cookin'! More, please!

[Pixilated]

Okay, definitely NOT a ghost story but for a few moments ... had I been half asleep ... it certainly might have been: a loud, quick rapping on the wall, as if somebody was beating a sharp tattoo on it with their knuckles.

Luckily I was awake (this was at 6 a.m. today, so it was still pitch dark outside) and I was also at the computer. I looked over in the direction of the sound. My cat was lying (as usual) on my Mac Mini and his hind foot had suddenly got twitchy ... and the wall was right behind him ...

[Antisocial_Worker]

I've shared some of my wilder tales, so here are a few that are mild n' creepy.

Dead relatives have a tendency to pop in from time to time in my family. When my niece and nephew were very young, they had a knack for finding money on the floor. When asked about it after an especially good haul of several quarters one day, my niece remarked casually that "papaw (grandpa) up in heaven gives it to me." This is the same papaw who she once enjoyed a long conversation with while playing the back bedroom. The same papaw who died about a decade before she was born.

Meanwhile, as my mother and father cycled in and out hospitals, my grandmother on my father's side had a tendency of visiting him in the hospital, while my mother's sister likes to visit her. Once, my mother saw my aunt peering at her from over the shoulder of one the EMT's in the ambulance, and another time in another ambulance my aunt held my mother's hand and said that she couldn't die yet because "(Niece) has to tell you about the goats." Unbeknownst to my mother, my niece had gone on a field trip to the Carl Sandburg home that day... where there is indeed a large and lovingly-cared-for herd of goats. My grandmother died in 2002 and my aunt in 2001, respectively. After my dad died, he put in several appearances at my mother's house as well as one visit to my apartment. My mother found wet washcloths in the bathroom for a few days running after my dad's death, left the way he used to leave his washcloths hung over the lip of the sink after shaving. Dad appeared once to me to tell me he loved me, but it bothered me because he appeared in the suit we buried him in, and that didn't seem right.

When it does come time to die, there are three death omens that may or may not appear in the days before the big event. As a young child, my mother's mother saw a white lamb silently enter the house in the middle of a summer night, circle three times around the cradle of her infant sister and leave just as silently... leaving the baby dead behind it. More than one great aunt went on at great length about the "13 lights of Heaven" appearing in their hospital rooms in the nights before their deaths. Finally -- and this is the one I never want to see -- my grandfather was haunted by floating white coffin that would trail along making an angry humming noise, as though filled with extremely irate bees. As any good Southerner would do, though, he took matters into his own hands and shot it with a hunting rifle -- at which time it promptly flipped over, popped open, and disgorged a dead white dog before vanishing. My grandfather kicked the dog's body into the ditch beside the road where this all occurred, and there it lay until it rotted.